I’ve recently purchased an Olight s15r as another attempt as an edc. I’m liking it very well so far. The intensity of the beam is actually pretty pleasant with the larger reflector than the d25a I’m moving from. The thing I’ve been wondering is with the specs that Olight claims, what the possibilities are of modifying this driver to push the light to a further potential of output. I’m not sure of the bin of this xm-l2, but there’s no way at the advertised and tested output of around 300-350 lumens that this LED is being pushed any harder than 700 mA right? This might be more trouble than it’s worth, but I will wondered if anyone had attempted to work on one of these lights.
Premium lights such as Olights are generall far harder to mod, as they are often built to prevent easy disassembly and will undoubtedly using a bespoke driver of sorts.
It isn’t impossible to mod, but you’ll find it much rarer than you do with budget lights.
I doubt this is the case. the Olight protected 14500 likely doesn’t have a protection trip until 4 amps on the lower end. I would imagine that it’s capable of consistently providing at least 2 amps of consistent current draw which would correspond with at least 600 lumens. Even if it was the olight battery, I’ve tried half a dozen others from sanyo UR14500, eagtac, nitecore, flames etc etc. At the lumen output that has been observed from this light it corresponds with sub 1amp drive. This speaks to a driver limitation to me. I’m sure it was intentional. For the most part, it makes sense. The run time on a 14500 pushing any harder than that absolutely sucks. For a practical light that you want to sell to the average consumer, you probably don’t want to advertise run times any lower than that. Heat production and safety concerns as well. etc… But as for me, lumens and lux. If I can put the flashlight on a base to charge every night, I don’t care what the runtime is. Convenience and performance. love it.
This is what I assumed. I’ve seen where some have mostly taken down the s15 baton, but I’ve come across no modifications at all. It would be worth effort and a little expense to me to modify this light to meet my needs as an EDC. I figure with as much as I spend on everything else I carry edc, I might as well do it right with my light too.
If you want more lux from it, then I suspect the easiest route would be to either de-dome the stock LED and accept the tint you’ll get, or replace it with an XP-G2. Neither will increase lumen output, but both will make it shine further distance.
I don’t know much about the S15R, I do have the S15 and it’s driver is a boost driver of sorts, as it’ll run on 1xAA, 2xAA or 1x14500. If the S15R is using a similar driver, then the 1xAA support (being only 1.2v) will likely be a limiting factor on how hard the light is being driven.
While I’m a fan of lights that throw well, I think that replacing this emitter with an xp-g2 would likely result in a more focused beam that I might need for EDC. the beam shape I think is perfect right now, but with a little extra juice I could get the extra throw that would be helpful for spotting at night. I might end up being stuck with what I have, which wouldn’t be terrible. I just wondered if there were any options out there. I’m assuming that a driver swap is all but impossible because of the complications of the switch and charging systems, but I wondered if there might be a possibility of altering the firmware or hardware of the driver to accommodate a higher mode. This might show my ignorance when it comes to the intricacies of drivers,especially in the more engineered lights like this one.